The Gilded Razor

The Gilded Razor
Author: Sam Lansky
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2016-01-12
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1476776164

Sharply funny and compulsively readable, The Gilded Razor is a “powerful addition to the literature of active addiction and recovery” (New York Times bestselling author Bill Clegg) from Sam Lansky. The Gilded Razor is the true story of a double life that New York Times bestselling author George Hodgman called “virtuosic.” By the age of seventeen, Sam Lansky was an all-star student with Ivy League aspirations in his final year at an elite New York City prep school. But a nasty addiction to prescription pills spiraled rapidly out of control, compounded by a string of reckless affairs with older men, leaving his bright future in jeopardy. After a terrifying overdose, he tried to straighten out. Yet as he journeyed from the glittering streets of Manhattan, to a wilderness boot camp in Utah, to a psych ward in New Orleans, he only found more opportunities to create chaos—until finally, he began to face himself. In the vein of Elizabeth Wurtzel and Augusten Burroughs, Lansky scrapes away at his own life as a young addict and exposes profoundly universal anxieties. Told with remarkable sensitivity, biting humor, and unrelenting self-awareness, The Gilded Razor is a coming-of-age story of searing honesty and lyricism and “one of the best portraits about the implacable power of addiction” (Susan Cheever, bestselling author of Drinking in America).

Broken People

Broken People
Author: Sam Lansky
Publisher: Harlequin
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2020-06-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1488055769

ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF THE YEAR Vogue, O, The Oprah Magazine, Parade, Library Journal, Harper’s Bazaar and more “Profound and affecting.”—Chloe Benjamin “Broken People leads us through the winds of time and memory to offer a riveting portrait of transformation. I am better for having read it.”—Jamie Lee Curtis A groundbreaking, incandescent debut novel about coming to grips with the past and ourselves, for fans of Sally Rooney, Hanya Yanagihara and Garth Greenwell “He fixes everything that’s wrong with you in three days.” This is what hooks Sam when he first overhears it at a fancy dinner party in the Hollywood hills: the story of a globe-trotting shaman who claims to perform “open-soul surgery” on emotionally damaged people. For neurotic, depressed Sam, new to Los Angeles after his life in New York imploded, the possibility of total transformation is utterly tantalizing. He’s desperate for something to believe in, and the shaman—who promises ancient rituals, plant medicine and encounters with the divine—seems convincing, enough for Sam to sign up for a weekend under his care. But are the great spirits the shaman says he’s summoning real at all? Or are the ghosts in Sam’s memory more powerful than any magic? At turns tender and acid, funny and wise, Broken People is a journey into the nature of truth and fiction—a story of discovering hope amid cynicism, intimacy within chaos and peace in our own skin.

The Gilded Razor

The Gilded Razor
Author: Sam Lansky
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2016-01-12
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1476776148

By the age of seventeen, Sam Lansky was an all-star student with Ivy League aspirations in his final year at an elite New York City prep school. But a nasty addiction to prescription pills spiraled rapidly out of control, compounded by a string of reckless affairs with older men, leaving his bright future in jeopardy. After a terrifying overdose, he tried to straighten out. Yet as he journeyed from the glittering streets of Manhattan, to a wilderness boot camp in Utah, to a psych ward in New Orleans, he only found more opportunities to create chaos--until finally, he began to face himself.

Razor-Wire Dharma

Razor-Wire Dharma
Author: Calvin Malone
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2008-10-10
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0861719549

Razor-Wire Dharma is an eloquent, enlightening, and utterly inspiring personal story how one man found Buddhism—and real, transformative meaning for his life—despite being in one of the world's harshest environments.

Gilded Latten Bones

Gilded Latten Bones
Author: Glen Cook
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2010-11-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101444940

For Garrett, P.I., loyalty and love come a close second to survival... Garrett's attempt at domestic bliss with the fiery Tinnie Tate is sidetracked when he waylays a pair of home intruders and learns they've been paid by an unknown source to kidnap Tinnie. But as Garrett rushes to find out who is trying to push his buttons, his best friend is attacked. Now, Garrett has to track down both malefactors. Unless they're really one and the same-in which case Garrett might be next...

All We Can Do Is Wait

All We Can Do Is Wait
Author: Richard Lawson
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2019-02-05
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 0448494124

Debut author and Vanity Fair film critic Richard Lawson makes your heart stop and time stand still in his extraordinary and life-affirming novel that's perfect for fans of If I Stay and We All Looked Up. In the hours after a bridge collapse rocks their city, a group of Boston teenagers meet in the waiting room of Massachusetts General Hospital: Siblings Jason and Alexa have already experienced enough grief for a lifetime, so in this moment of confusion and despair, Alexa hopes that she can look to her brother for support. But a secret Jason has been keeping from his sister threatens to tear the siblings apart...right when they need each other most. Scott is waiting to hear about his girlfriend, Aimee, who was on a bus with her theater group when the bridge went down. Their relationship has been rocky, but Scott knows that if he can just see Aimee one more time, if she can just make it through this ordeal and he can tell her he loves her, everything will be all right. And then there's Skyler, whose sister Kate—the sister who is more like a mother, the sister who is basically Skyler's everything—was crossing the bridge when it collapsed. As the minutes tick by without a word from the hospital staff, Skyler is left to wonder how she can possibly move through life without the one person who makes her feel strong when she's at her weakest. In his riveting, achingly beautiful debut, Richard Lawson guides readers through an emotional and life-changing night as these teens are forced to face the reality of their pasts...and the prospect of very different futures.

IRL

IRL
Author: Chris Stedman
Publisher: Broadleaf Books
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2020-10-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1506463525

What Does "IRL (In Real Life)" Really Mean in Today's Digital Age? It's easy and reflexive to view our online presence as fake, to see the internet as a space we enter when we aren't living our real, offline lives. Yet so much of who we are and what we do now happens online, making it hard to know which parts of our lives are real IRL, Chris Stedman's personal and searing exploration of authenticity in the digital age, shines a light on how age-old notions of realness--who we are and where we fit in the world--can be freshly understood in our increasingly online lives. Stedman offers a different way of seeing the supposed split between our online and offline selves: the internet and social media are new tools for understanding and expressing ourselves, and the not-always-graceful ways we use these tools can reveal new insights into far older human behaviors and desires. IRL invites readers to consider how we use the internet to fulfill the essential human need to feel real--a need many of us once met in institutions, but now seek to do on our own, online--as well as the ways we edit or curate ourselves for digital audiences. The digital search for meaning and belonging presents challenges, Stedman suggests, but also myriad opportunities to become more fully human. In the end, he makes a bold case for embracing realness in all of its uncertainty, online and off, even when it feels risky.

River of Shadows

River of Shadows
Author: Rebecca Solnit
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2004-03-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0142004103

A New York Times Notable Book Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, The Mark Lynton History Prize, and the Sally Hacker Prize for the History of Technology “A panoramic vision of cultural change” —The New York Times Through the story of the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge, the author of Orwell's Roses explores what it was about California in the late 19th-century that enabled it to become such a center of technological and cultural innovation The world as we know it today began in California in the late 1800s, and Eadweard Muybridge had a lot to do with it. This striking assertion is at the heart of Rebecca Solnit’s new book, which weaves together biography, history, and fascinating insights into art and technology to create a boldly original portrait of America on the threshold of modernity. The story of Muybridge—who in 1872 succeeded in capturing high-speed motion photographically—becomes a lens for a larger story about the acceleration and industrialization of everyday life. Solnit shows how the peculiar freedoms and opportunities of post–Civil War California led directly to the two industries—Hollywood and Silicon Valley—that have most powerfully defined contemporary society.

Battleborn

Battleborn
Author: Claire Vaye Watkins
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2012
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1594488258

The extraordinary debut collection from the Guggenheim Award-winning author of the forthcoming Gold Fame Citrus Winner of the 2012 Story Prize Recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters 2013 Rosenthal Family Foundation Award Named one of the National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35" fiction writers of 2012 Winner of New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award NPR Best Short Story Collections of 2012 A Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, and Time Out New York Best Book of the year, and more . . . Like the work of Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Richard Ford, and Annie Proulx, Battleborn represents a near-perfect confluence of sensibility and setting, and the introduction of an exceptionally powerful and original literary voice. In each of these ten unforgettable stories, Claire Vaye Watkins writes her way fearlessly into the mythology of the American West, utterly reimagining it. Her characters orbit around the region's vast spaces, winning redemption despite - and often because of - the hardship and violence they endure. The arrival of a foreigner transforms the exchange of eroticism and emotion at a prostitution ranch. A prospecting hermit discovers the limits of his rugged individualism when he tries to rescue an abused teenager. Decades after she led her best friend into a degrading encounter in a Vegas hotel room, a woman feels the aftershock. Most bravely of all, Watkins takes on - and reinvents - her own troubled legacy in a story that emerges from the mayhem and destruction of Helter Skelter. Arcing from the sweeping and sublime to the minute and personal, from Gold Rush to ghost town to desert to brothel, the collection echoes not only in its title but also in its fierce, undefeated spirit the motto of her home state.